Story Luck

Last night was the Story Luck Show

Yesterday a friend grilled me, “Wait a second, what does my ticket money go to?”

I told her, “It’s not like 1 to 1. It goes to the non profit’s general operating budget.”

“Yeah but, like what’s rent? Because if you don’t pay the walk up tellers, they are basically paying to create your show.”

This is something that bothers me.

Currently we are paying our features $25 and we usually pay 1 techie. Sometimes it’s a sound person, but usually it’s to have photographer come and take shots during the show.

Rent is the biggest expense at $375 a month but… there’s also food, (Usually we spend $50-100 depending if we need utensils and napkins etc.)

Marketing is the next biggest expense, we usually spend $60-$125 on digital ads and we like passing out postcards, so we have thousands of those. Meetup costs us $60 a month. There are also other sunk costs that are harder to categorize. I use adobe to podcast and create graphics so we have a subscription to that, the website is like $120 every three months, we pay $120 a year for drop box, and $100 for soundcloud. 30 a month for various video sotware services outside adobe’s suite… which I spend more time on. Oh! Mailchimp is $39 a month.

There’s probably little things I’m not thinking about…

But it's not a lot… but most of that stuff gets used for EVERYTHING we do, not just the show.

For us there are two paths to victory, both of which will work in a virtuous cycle, we either need to get the show to be sold out, or we need to get 12 sponsors for next year. (At any combination of levels.)

In terms of marketing… I feel like I’m at a bit of a loss. Emotionally, it feels like the show should be growing. We have decent retention, but we don’t have the growth you’d expect given that retention. We aren’t getting good word of mouth. So maybe that’s the answer, I need to empower or activate the audience… I need to tell people who’ve come to 3-5 shows to tell more of their friends.

In terms of sponsorship… I am feeling confident we will get Angry Octopus to sponsor us again next year. And we have a pledge from Lunch Heros. It’s not sponsorship but we have two donors who have pledged 100 dollars a month through out next year. So there is some movement there. Still, I’m frustrated with my work ethic… I really wanted to have 12 lined up by this show.

So, hopefully I’ll be doing some accountability posting over the next 4 weeks as we move into December.

Do you think we can get to a sold out show for Dec 14th?

Last year, our Dec show was our biggest. So, it might happen. But seems bigger than an uphill battle.

In my mind, I’d like the show to be monthly and bringing in 10k a month. (This would mean getting a larger venue and more people to watch the live stream.) I’d like to be paying all the volunteers as well as the open swap tellers. I think what we will do for next year, is all the open swap tellers will get a voucher ticket for next month’s show. That seems a good idea.

Doing the ego death work of door knocking local businesses is the first step to being the biggest storytelling show in Chicago.

Wish me luck.

Sunday will feature Kat Pleviak!

We loved her open mic story, and now she's coming back with a longer featured peice.

Psychologists Can't Read Minds, But They Tell Good Stories. ~ Story Luck Join us Oct 12 at Theater Wit for The Story Luck Show featuring puppeteer & psychologist-in-training Kat Pleviak.

Two more shows this year! - https://mailchi.mp/storyluck.org/a-tale-of-two-chicagoans-which-are-you-5760118